Arts venues not enough
IN the 1970s, Townsville’s performing arts facilities consisted of one theatre (the Theatre Royal in Flinders St) and the old School of Arts in Stanley St.
The Townsville City Council considered this inadequate for a growing city of 100,000 people that needed a number of modern theatre facilities. The answer clearly was to build a Performing Arts Centre (PAC), because a multi-venue centre is far more versatile and practical, not to mention much cheaper in both capital and operational cost, than scattered stand-alone venues.
But where to put it?
A PAC requires a very large site both for the facility itself and the necessary parking and it must have good access to the arterial road system.
The answer was to utilise part of Reid Park on the other side of the creek to the CBD.
A very similar decision was made in Brisbane in developing QPAC on the other side of the river to the CBD.
So, in 1978, stage one of our PAC – the Civic Theatre – opened its doors with stage two promised for five years’ time. We are still waiting for stage two.
In the decades since the 1970s we have seen Townsville’s community facilities – halls, libraries, etc – greatly expand.
Our sporting facilities are good and unrecognisable compared with those of the 1970s. We have acquired an enormous parks estate, one that is out of all proportion to our actual needs and beyond us financially to properly maintain.
And yet over all that time our arts and cultural facility needs have been largely ignored.
We desperately need a small theatre, say 200 seats, and a mediumsized theatre, 500 to 600 seats, and an outdoor theatre, say 2000 capacity.
With a climate as fantastic as ours for outdoor events to not have a fitfor-purpose amphitheatre is hard to comprehend. We also need at least one venue with the right acoustics for live music and voice, i.e. either a concert hall or a recital hall.
These are not all of the venues we might wish for, but they are the essential core venues that should have been added to our PAC by the end of the 1990s.
Instead nothing has happened and as a result each year we have been missing out on more and more events and performances, and have slipped further and further behind compared with the arts facilities of our neighbouring cities.
Cairns, Mackay and even Rockhampton, a city well under half our size, have, on balance, superior arts facilities overall to those of Townsville.
For five years now the council has determinedly ignored the TPAC proposal (for details, see www.tpac.net.au) in which the performing arts community clearly identified our needs and proposed a detailed, costed concept for how they might best be addressed. This is an outrageous situation.
We are now being promised a start on “a concert hall” within the next term of the council. This is apparently to be accompanied by a “performance space”, presumably a multi-use black box type venue.
No mention of our PAC, no sign of the small, medium or outdoor theatres for which there is the greatest actual demand, and a “start” in four years’ time means that we are probably six years or more from a facility open for use. It is all too little, too late.
It seems likely that Riverway will never reopen as a venue so it would appear that in 2020 Townsville’s performing arts facilities, in a growing city of over 180,000, will consist of one theatre and the old School of Arts in Stanley St.
SIMON MCCONNELL, Mundingburra.